SAN FRANCISCO — For the past two weeks, ten companies have been consulting with mentors, growing their business models and collaborating with one target demographic in mind: girls in impoverished parts of the world, a population that many say is the most marginalized in the world.

On Tuesday, these companies showed off their progress at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco as part of the culminating event of the Girl Effect accelerator, a program launched by the Nike Foundation and the Unreasonable Group. The products and services they offer range from eco-friendly charcoal and menstrual hygiene products to mobile payment platforms and high-tech educational services, and all ten are based in Africa or India.

The Girl Effect is grounded in research that shows that a key to combating poverty on a global scale is protecting, educating and investing in girls in developing regions, which will in turn strengthen communities as a whole. Many studies show that women in developing countries tend to invest more of their earnings into their family's well-being than men.

As Shaifali Puri, executive director of global innovation at the Nike Foundation, told the audience during her opening remarks, there is also huge amount of untapped economic potential that goes hand in hand with these goals.

India loses $383 billion in potential lifetime earnings from its 4 million adolescent pregnancies per year, and if adolescent girls in Ethiopia were able to complete secondary school, they could contribute about $6.8 billion to the country's economy, Puri said.

The Girl Effect accelerator aims to tackle these problems not through nonprofit philanthropy or government aid, but through socially conscious revenue-generating businesses that Puri said can sometimes better address the needs of the populations they serve.

"To unleash the massive scale of resources that matches the massive scale of these problems and to do so in a way that is self-generating and sustainable, is going to require having private sector resources and markets work for adolescent girls in extreme poverty," Puri said.

The goals these companies have undertaken are no small venture. As Puri said, these entrepreneurs "have made the impossible merely difficult."

Yet, because there is a lack of established companies focused on these markets, many of the companies are growing rapidly.

Paga, a mobile payment platform that targets the 70% of Nigerians without access to banking, has garnered 1.8 million users since it launched in 2009, and Bridge International Academies now operates hundreds of for-profit schools across the world that cost about $6 per month.

"Several are even generating revenue, which is an unusual term in these parts," Puri said.

Millicent Mwendwa, vice president of business development for Eneza, a company that uses texting to distribute educational materials, said the accelerator opened up many new doors for her company in terms of collaboration and prompted them to re-think how they market their product.

"Sometimes as a company we tend to hold back what we believe in because of revenue or the direction of the company, but sometimes out of that spontaneity of not being afraid of doing what you need to do, great things happen," Mwendwa said.

Many of the ventures, such as Bridge International Academies or Embrace, a company that makes infant warmers, have a direct and immediately visible impact on girls. Others, like Paga or Greenlight Planet, a company that produces low-cost solar lights, affect girls in ways you might not expect.

In order to understand the connection between companies like Paga or Greenlight and girls, you have to understand the typical family dynamics of the customers who are using these products, the founders said.

In the off-grid Indian village where Greenlight got its start, kerosene lamps were the primary source of light. These lamps were dim and expensive for families to keep running so girls were often the last ones to get access to the light. With Greenlight's product, which is 15 times brighter than the lamps, girls can use the light to study or read, founder Anish Thakkar said.

"The accelerator has forced us to focus on probably the most disenfranchised person in the household, which is the girl," Thakkar said. "It's easy to think about an off-grid home that gets a solar light and think that the mission is won, but the truth is that in many cases the light is not shared equally by every member of the house."

Tayo Oviosu said Paga is important for parents making school payments to keep their daughters in school and for young girls learning how to budget their money for the first time. "I think my company is going to be changed significantly coming out of this experience in terms of our focus and how we actually approach this particular issue," Oviosu said.

Paga founder Tayo Oviosu presents to the audience at the Girl Effect accelerator event in San Francisco.

In the couple days after the event, the entrepreneurs will meet with a group of investors before going their separate ways. The companies will also have access to a $500,000 revolving loan program for short-term funding.

"One of the reasons we wanted to do this culminating event this way here in San Francisco is because I really don't want your readers — your tech-savvy, venture capital-immersed readers — to think that this is an anomaly," Puri told Mashable.

"These entrepreneurs are leapfrogging the absence of electrical grid systems, leapfrogging the absence of schools, leapfrogging the absence of banks. And they are doing it by doing what the best entrepreneurs do, by identifying a need, creating a best-in-class service or product and executing brilliantly."

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